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December 14, 2013

'The Draw' Is Poison

"There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto," Kevin D. Williamson reports from Appalachia,

the vast moribund
matrix of Wonder Bread-hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching
from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating
nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the
last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where
African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw
materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of
profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have
been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the
future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead
of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope,
the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings
up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of
food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old
hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of
meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the
recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and
death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over
a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are
getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1
percent from 1987 to 2007. If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent
white, we’d call it a reservation. ...

"The draw," the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents' earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It's a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders. "This is painful for a liberal to admit," Kristof wrote, "but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America's safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency."